(Sorry it took me so long to get this up ya'll!)
See Part I here.....
Monday rolled around and I packed my car with all of my hospital stuff, just in case. And headed to my doctor appointment, alone. My husband went off to work and my in-laws stayed home. They wanted to come with me but I insisted that was a waste of their time because I was sure it was going to be the same story as Friday. I didn't feel any different and I didn't want them to have to wait in the waiting room for however long it would take to check me out and send me home again. Little did I know that wouldn't be the case.....!
I went in and all of the ladies in the office were dissapointed to see me, they all thought for sure I'd have this little babe over the weekend. That's definitely what I was hoping for to! So I got called back, did the pee test for the umteenth time and then waited to see my doctor. Once she came in I mentioned the "leakage" that I had over the weekend and she immediately did a test to determine if it was my amniotic fluid. The test came back inconclusive, so at that point she gave me a choice, I could either go over to the hospital next door and get induced or I got over to the hospital and have them do another test that would definitely tell us if I was leaking amniotic fluid. The catch to getting the hospital to do the test on me was if it came back negative I would get sent home and would have to wait a few more days to get induced. Don't ask me what kind of sense that makes because I honestly couldn't tell you. So I obviously chose to march my happy self on over to the hospital and say, induce me please!
It was the most surreal experience to go and get my hospital bag from my car and get checked in to the hospital by myself. I had called my husband and my mom (she would be in the room with me the whole time because I wanted her there) but neither of them had shown up yet. I had a great team of nurses get me set up but I was pretty scared not knowing what to expect as they hooked the iv's up and started the patocin. I had gotten all set up and then JR arrived with his parents and a little while later my mom came. And so started what would end up being 24 hours of labor.
Now I never wrote out a birth plan, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to get an epidural, I had no desire whatsoever to have a natural birth. If there's a way to lessen the pain, I'm taking it! And I went in open minded and okay with whatever needed to happen, if I needed a C-section for some reason then so be it. My main goal was the safety of myself and my baby and that was it. So the doctor told me I could have an epidural whenever I wanted it. I've read so many birth stories where the women weren't allowed to have an epidural until they were so many centimeters dilated but luckily they didn't make me wait. Of course I wanted to see how long I could go and I think I made it 3 or 4 hours, the nurses kept coming in and asking me what my pain level was and if I wanted the epidural. Come to find out when I finally did get the epidural I was only like 2 1/2 centimeters dilated but the contractions are more intense with the patocin (supposedly). The epidural was not bad at all, it was a little sting with the numbing shot and a little weird uncomfortable feeling when the needle was going in but after that it was great! I'm glad I got the epidural started when I did because I didn't have to feel the catheter go in, gross.
The hours passed and we watched the monitor with all of the other women around me and we would hear a baby crying and then would see that woman go off the monitor. It was a little frustrating knowing all these women around me were having babies and I was laying there feeling like nothing was happening! At some point in the middle of the night my epidural ran out and they needed to change the bag out. At that point I was about 6 centimeters and I could feel everything and I had the worst back pain! I couldn't believe how bad it hurt and when the nurse said that the epidural was flowing back to my iv I said there's no way, because I was still feeling the pain! She told me it was probably because the second bag won't be as strong as the first since it wasn't the one that the doctor put in??? That doesn't make any sense to me and I told her no there's something wrong because I'm hurting a lot!! She ended up having to give me a shot of some kind of "-cane" medicine to jump start the epidural again! But it did finally start to work again, thank goodness because I still had a while to go and I hadn't even started pushing yet.
And when we finally got to the pushing part I would end up pushing for 4 hours!......
